How to make Admin audit log (audit.log) compliant with GDPR

ℹ️ Support
, , ,
3

You should do logrotation by the logrotate daemon instead of the nextcloud server itself.

First of all, move your logfiles out of the netcloud data directory to /var/log/nextcloud/*

sudo mkdir -p /var/log/nextcloud
sudo chown www-data.www-data /var/log/nextcloud

Create this file:
/etc/logrotate.d/nextcloud

var/log/nextcloud/*.log {
    su www-data www-data
    size 10M
    missingok
    daily
    rotate 7
    maxage 30
    dateext
    dateformat -%Y%m%d
    create 640 www-data www-data
    compress
    delaycompress
}

Here are the main lines used for deleting log files based on age:

rotate 7: Keeps up to 7 older log files.
maxage 30: Deletes log files older than 30 days.
You can adjust these values according to your requirements. Note that daily ensures that log rotation occurs daily. The dateext parameter adds the current date to the rotated log file name, and dateformat -%Y%m%d specifies the date in year-month-day format.

You have to change the log settings from your config.php (example):

config/config.php

  'logtimezone' => 'Europe/Berlin',
  'logfile' => '/var/log/nextcloud/nextcloud.log',
  'logfile_audit' => '/var/log/nextcloud/audit.log',
  'log.condition' => 
  array (
    'apps' => 
    array (
      0 => 'admin_audit',
    ),
  ),
  'log_query' => false,
  'loglevel' => 2,
  'log_rotate_size' => 0,

With 'log_rotate_size' => 0,Nextcloud does not logrotate at all and so it can be carried out by the operating system’s logrotate service, which guarantees GDPR compliency.

Hope this helps!

Much luck,
ernolf

3 Likes